Is Creative Commons Dangerous?

MCMFriday, May 20, 2005

This post is from a version of my blog with inconsistent timestamps: evidently I was very good at defining 'modified' dates, but not 'created' dates. As such, I can't be sure when the content was actually written. Sorry!

I stumbled upon this article on Yahoo* this evening and found the tone to be a wee bit alarming. On the surface, it seems like a nice feature on CC and all the great things it can achieve, but every few paragraphs, you get a quote almost equating CC with a perverse type of satanism...

I might be touchy on this subject, but the last bit of the article says "Had he given up his rights to those early hits, he would not have the resources to cover his treatment for AIDS" ... which is a stupidly low blow. There's nothing in a CC license that says that you can't still earn enough money to battle AIDS, and they just throw without a rebuttal.

I seriously doubt CC is the end of life as we know it, but maybe I'm wrong. Certainly all the lawyers I've spoken to think it is. Am I crazy, or is free-moving creative content a good thing?

Apparently the original article got lost somewhere in Yahoo News. But it was damn good reading.